Abstract
The terms of Logos used by John Apostle has, without doubt, reverberations in stoic philosophy, at Plato and it was already used by Philo of Alexandria. Can it be said that the Christian theology assumed, simply, one Greek philosophical concept and it bunk of concept of God? Has Christianity somehow absorbed the Greek teachings from pragmatic reasons, thus giving a direction to Christian dogmatists who initially did not have a plan and which they could not change it following? In this paper I try to show that this does not happen—the proof is the Gnosticism condemnation by the Church Fathers—and that the concept of Logos was used in philosophical interpretation of the Christian faith, being a constituent of faith. When the Saint John says that Jesus is the Logos, this isn’t a philosophical statement, but one religion.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Plato, Parmenide (128b), Clement of Alexandria, Stromata VI. 2
- 2.
Here is the correspondent of Maximus the Confessor: “By hiding himself secretly among reasons, the Word offers itself to understanding, proportionally, and through each of the visible things, as through letters, whole and entire in all and full in al land undiminished, the Undiscernable and always the same within the discernables, the Simple and whole in all parts, he One with no beginning among the things begun, the invisible among the visibles, the Untouched among the touched. […] so that in all these to gather us around Him, us, who are His followers, uniting us in spirit to lift us to His simple understanding and freed from contact with them, concentrating our attention towards uniting with Him the same way He differentiated Himself by coming down on earth for us” (Ambigua, P.G., 91, 1285).
- 3.
We shall see that the philosopher intends just that: to live the state of grace in the realm of ideas via a philosophical life: “if we all live a life truly dedicated to philosophy, we shall all know God with the clarity illuminated people are really capable of” (Plato, The Letter VIth 323d).
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Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the strategic grant POSDRU/159/1.5/S/140863, Project ID 140863 (2014) co-financed by the European Social Fund within the Sectorial Operational Program Human Resources Development 2007–2013.
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Pop, R. (2017). The Logos from Reason to the Wonder of Mind. In: Maturo, A., Hošková-Mayerová, Š., Soitu, DT., Kacprzyk, J. (eds) Recent Trends in Social Systems: Quantitative Theories and Quantitative Models. Studies in Systems, Decision and Control, vol 66. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40585-8_29
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